Algorithmic Ranking Is Unfairly Maligned

Dynomight | 24th January 2025

The algorithms in the platforms we use are tuned to create the maximum profit. This is fine if the user's tastes and goals align with the company's profitability, but mostly produces a degraded experience. It doesn't have to, though. "If all the information that enters your brain is being filtered by an algorithm, it seems important that you know the algorithm is on your side" (2,000 words)

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Bitter: A Map

Janan Alexandra | Offing | 26th November 2024

Poet's take on the word "bitter", via both etymological and emotional resonances. The word came from two Old English words: biter, meaning "having a harsh taste, sharp, cutting; angry, full of animosity; cruel" and bitan, "to bite". It's a word felt in the place where it is spoken. "Bitter thus situates us firmly in the mouth, between tongue and teeth, if we weren’t convinced of that already"(900 words)

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Innit Innit Boys And Super Eagles

Aniefiok Ekpoudom | Guardian | 23rd January 2025 | U

Football is integral to British-Nigerian identity. Such professionals have long chosen to travel abroad to play for Nigeria. They are known as "the innit innit boys". "Families spread across continents, frayed by the aftershocks of colonialism and war and political turbulence and economic turmoil, reuniting briefly under the banners of the Super Eagles. For 90 minutes, Nigeria is whole" (3,400 words)

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How Art Lost Its Way

William Deresiewicz | Persuasion | 6th January 2025 | U

Lament for the lost art of criticism, which was killed by the triple threat of journalism cutbacks, writers distracted by "the discourse", and consumers' unwillingness to expand their horizons. "What’s missing is a broader sense that art is urgent business, that your life, in some sense, depends on it. With that goes not only the possibility of meaningful criticism, but also its point" (2,500 words)

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The Strange Power Of Laughter

Kirsten Bell | Sapiens | 21st January 2025

Nobody knows why we laugh, pushing our repeated puffs of air to make a noise others register as amusement. Other primates laugh, but it is giving meaning to laughter that seems unique to the human condition. Disapproval of laughter also seems to be one of our defining characteristics, perhaps because it sometimes occurs outside our conscious control — "cracking up" is alarming (1,500 words)

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Chimes At Midnight

Alec Nevala-Lee | Asterisk | 21st January 2025

A visit to "The Clock of the Long Now", an underground timepiece designed to run for 10,000 years. The clock face is eight feet across and the mechanism stands 200 feet high. Designed by the inventor Danny Hillis with input from science fiction writer Neal Stephenson, it was funded by Jeff Bezos and built under a Texas mountain range he owns. Getting inside is "illegal but not difficult" (5,000 words)

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Twenty Lessons On Tyranny

Timothy Snyder | Thinking About | 20th January 2025

“Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. Beware the one-party state. They exploited a historic moment to make political life impossible for their opponents. Notice the swastikas. Do not get used to them. Remember professional ethics. Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labour” (1,300 words)

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The Trouble With Aggregates

Reuven Brenner | Law & Liberty | 20th January 2025

Macroeconomics uses national aggregate numbers to gauge living standards but pays little attention to their reliability in concept or measurement. “Too much aggregation mixes the unmixable and gives us models that are easy to handle but with low, if any, power of resolution.” Governments can use these statistics to justify bad policy. “In many ways, the macroeconomic sector is comparable to astrology” (3,200 words)

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The Wild Heart Of David Lynch

Matt Feeney | UnHerd | 20th January 2025

“In every Lynch film there are shots and scenes that make you want to throw your head back and laugh at their sheer audacious beauty. His whimsical sayings — some hybrid of a seven-year-old boy and ninety-year-old man — travelled with the internet’s most wholesome memes. And his art sat at the heart of contemporary culture as its most searching examinations of human fallenness and depravity” (2,600 words)

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Do We Need A Second New Deal?

Nathan J. Robinson | Current Affairs | 20th January 2025

On how FDR got public and legislative support for sweeping changes. “Any president or party who wants to be successful should take that lesson from Roosevelt: give people things they can see and feel, and tell them you’ve given it to them. He made them feel that with him in the White House they shared the presidency. The New Deal did not just give monetary handouts. It fostered culture and belonging” (3,900 words)

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Loskop To Swakop

Stan Engelbrecht | Radavist | 15th January 2025 | U

Travel diary covering a cycling trip across Namibia, one of the most sparsely populated places in the world. There are practical challenges and travelling with a support vehicle seems wise, but the wonders of the place make up for it. The so-called "Moon Landscape" is breathtaking and the occasional subterranean boom from the mining industry only adds to the eerieness (2,300 words)

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A Shoddy Work Of History

Stefan Gužvica | Jacobin | 7th January 2025 | U

The Black Book of Communism is a 1997 essay collection by a group of European academics. It was intended to be "a massive compendium of crimes and deaths committed in the name of communism" but is riddled with incorrect data, including the disputed "one hundred million deaths" figure. Yet the book's popularity endures, influencing people who have never heard of it (2,700 words)

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Podcast: Can Beef Be Done Better? | Small Things Big Climate. It can, with difficulty. One useful rule: "We should all be eating half as much beef and paying twice as much for it" (34m 14s)

Video: A Five Year Old Prodigy | YouTube | British Pathé | 1m 25s

Performance from 1930 by five-year-old Ruth Slenczynski, who turned 100 years old in January 2025. A virtuoso pianist, she is the last surviving pupil of Sergei Rachmaninov.

The Honourable Parts

Spencer Wright | Scope Of Work | 6th January 2025

On industrial photographer Christopher Payne’s odes to modern manufacturing. “His subjects are often highly engineered (Boeing’s 787 assembly line), but just as often they’re highly soulful (Steinway pianos). There are also moments when Payne zooms out, and the reader sees an entire industrial symphony. Here, the subject of Payne’s photography seems to be modern industrial complexity itself” (5,100 words)

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The Story Of Russian Roulette

Beat Kuhn | Swiss National Museum | 14th January 2025

Perhaps invented by the Russians, but made famous by Swiss author Georges Surdez with his 1937 story by the same name. Its protagonist, Sergeant Burkowski, is a gambler who survives many rounds of Russian Roulette before deliberately shooting himself. In the story, he claims the game was invented in 1917 by Russian soldiers in Romania. Was it just a “clever fictional contrivance”? We don’t know (1,200 words)

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The Cargo Cult Metaphor

Ken Shirriff | 12th January 2025

Discursive history of the “cargo cult” metaphor, popularised by Feynman in a famous speech to describe people who “follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but are missing something essential”. He derived the term from Pacific Islanders who saw wartime airplanes bring supplies, and later built fire-lit runways and bamboo radio towers, waiting in vain for planes to land (10,100 words)

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Knowing Things Is Hard

Sean Manning | Book And Sword | 11th January 2025

This ongoing lexicon catalogues all the reasons why. Examples — “Harmonisation of sources: erasing the parts of sources which disagree with each other. Friedman’s Law of Anecdotes: distrust any historical anecdote good enough to have survived on its literary merit. Telescoping the Past: people naturally blend all times before the memories of the oldest person they listen to as “old times”” (5,200 words)

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A Storm Trapped A Luxury Passenger Train

Robert Klara | Smithsonian | 9th January 2025

In January 1952, snowdrifts stalled and buried a train in the Sierra Nevadas. The streamliner service from Chicago to San Francisco usually took 40 hours and 15 minutes. After 24 hours of being stuck, the lights went out. Then carbon monoxide began to leak from the portable heaters and food had to rationed. Wealthy passengers were losing it by the time help arrived three days later (1,800 words)

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The Rise And Fall Of "Fact-Checking"

Nate Silver | Silver Bulletin | 8th January 2025

Reducing content moderation by fact-checkers on Facebook is likely "the right move for the wrong reasons", Silver argues. The checkers had minimal power — they could not remove material, merely "demote" it — and the volume of false claims was always too great to address. Fact checking should be an intrinsic part of journalism before publication, not a separate enterprise later on (1,900 words)

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